About

In 1989-90 I undertook a survey of Scottish Hospitals, funded by a grant from the Scottish Research Council. This resulted in an unpublished gazetteer and formed the basis of a short book, published by Historic Scotland in 2010 entitled Building up your Health – available free as a PDF here.

I thought it was high time that the gazetteer should be both updated and shared more widely and so I started this blog. There are pages covering each area of Scotland in which there is a list of the hospitals, past and present. I am slowly updating the original gazetteer entries and adding maps and illustrations. This is a work in progress, so will change and grow over the coming months. In addition I have been writing occasional posts, highlighting particular sites or building types.

I would also like to share some of the work that I was involved in for the Royal Commission on the Historic Monuments of England’s survey of hospital buildings undertaken in 1991-4, and which resulted in a large body of work deposited in Historic England’s archives at Swindon and a book published in 1998 English Hospitals 1660-1948. A team of six worked on the hospitals project, based in the RCHME offices in York, Cambridge and London. Robert Taylor in the Cambridge office produced a monthly newsletter which he circulated amongst the team, entitled the Hospitals Investigator. Here you will find extracts from the newsletter in occasional blog posts.

Between 1991 and 2018 I worked on the Survey of London, latterly on Oxford Street, and contributed to the volumes on Knightsbridge, Clerkenwell, Battersea and South East Marylebone. I took early retirement in February 2018 and moved back to Scotland.

The Hospital was to the north-west of Lennoxtown. None of the hospital buildings survives, apart from some staff houses on Netherton Oval. New housing was built in 2009-10 on the site of the maternity hospital (Castle Circle) and Celtic’s Lennoxtown training ground is on the site of the former institution. The castle itself is in ruins.
good luck with your project,
best wishes from Harriet